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"The rapid online spread of deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift has renewed calls, including from US politicians, to criminalise the practice, in which artificial intelligence is used to synthesise fake but convincing explicit imagery. The images of the US popstar have been distributed across social media and seen by millions this week. Previously distributed on the app Telegram, one of the images of Swift hosted on X was seen 47m times before it was removed."

"Legislation passed last week by the Kentucky Senate will allow computer programming classes to count toward fulfilling high school foreign-language requirements in public schools."

""It seems Cameron and Perry have ignored official government policy, invented their own policy and forced it onto UK ISPs. With no legislation, and no complaints from Lib Dem MPS or the ISPs, we have completely unaccountable "nudge censorship" being forced onto the UK population with no debate.""

"India has started using a system that allows security agencies and income tax officials to directly intercept phone calls and emails without any court or legislative oversight, Reuters reported this summer."

"Given the government's obsession with passing cybersecurity legislation, you would think they'd be happy that Apple and Google are making it harder for foreign governments and criminals to break into people's phones or company servers to steal your data. But you'd be forgetting that the head of the FBI and his fellow fear-mongerers are still much more concerned with making sure they retain control over your privacy, rather than protecting everyone's cybersecurity."

"After getting caught breaking its own laws with a mass surveillance program, the French government has introduced legislation that mirrors the NSA's rules, giving it the power to spy on all foreigners -- and any French people who happen to be swept up in the dragnet."

"Many of the countries buying into that technology, however, still lack the institutions and the legislative oversight to keep it under control. In young, volatile democracies especially, the lure of technological greatness is already coming at a great social cost. "The thing with technology is that it kind of becomes irresistible," says Professor Webster. "It's very tempting when it can do something for us more efficiently. But just because the technology can do something it doesn't mean we should use it.""

"That's the crux of the problem. While you can legislate to only give state agencies access to terrorists' communications, and with proper oversight and authorisation, you cannot actually build encryption that works like that. If you put a backdoor in, it's there not just for security services to exploit, but for cyber-criminals, oppressive regimes and anyone else."

"Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached. On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users."

"In just the past few months, three cities - San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts - have passed laws to ban government use of the controversial technology, which analyzes pictures or live video of human faces in order to identify them. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also moving toward a government ban. Congress recently held two oversight hearings on the topic and there are at least four pieces of current federal legislation to limit the technology in some way. "

"The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for matches to suspects' DNA on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives."

"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"But the technology raises important issues of governance, justice and fairness. In recent months, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken action to address what it sees as an abuse of police power and surveillance technology. Facing reputational and financial costs, several major tech companies stopped developing facial recognition or selling it to the police. Microsoft went as far as petitioning the US Congress to legislate against it."

"Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance. "

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

""We believe the government should introduce legislation that ensures commercial images are labelled with a logo where any part of the body, including its proportions and skin tone, are digitally altered," its report says. Meanwhile, it says dermal fillers should be made prescription-only substances, in line with Botox, and there should be minimum training standards for providers."

"A new online study in Scientific Reports finds that drivers of these vehicles are assigned most of the blame for crashes which, the team argues, they can't reasonably avoid. This work is important because, as Niek Beckers at Delft University of Technology and colleagues point out, public opinion on this matter could shape future vehicle design and also legislation."

"The UK is not Russia. For all that the many civil liberty campaigners will complain, as is their role, the independence of the judiciary remains strong. The laws relating to freedom of association, expression and right to privacy are well defended in parliament and outside. But the technology, the means by which the state might insert itself into our lives, is developing apace. The checks and balances are not. The Guardian has revealed that the government is legislating, without fanfare, to allow the police and the National Crime Agency to run facial recognition searches across the UK's driving licence records. When the police have an image, they will be able to identify the person, it is hoped, through the photographic images the state holds for the purposes of ensuring that the roads are safe. Searching those digital images would have taken more man-hours than could have been justified in the old analogue world. It is now a matter of pushing a button, thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence systems that are able to match biometric measurements in a flash."

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."